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What an Internet “Kill Switch” Would Mean to the Public Cloud

In the wake of the events in Egypt in early February–and the cut-off of Internet access by the Egyptian government in response to protests coordinated partially by social media–the U.S. Senate took up legislation that would give the President the ability to exert emergency powers over Internet traffic in the event of cyber attack or some other sort of nationwide cyber threat.

While senators deny that any legislation will include a “kill switch” measure–allowing the President to shut down the public Internet in case of an emergency–just the discussion of such a capability has sent waves of concern through the Internet community, and it has raised major concerns about what the impact of legislation could be on public cloud providers.

David Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, recently wrote an article about how just the idea of a “kill switch” is already hurting cloud providers. The reason: organizations are reluctant to invest in cloud computing as a solution, because they are concerned about the possibility of their connection to data being “pulled from (them) at any time.”

But it doesn’t take an Internet “kill switch” to make that happen. A denial-of-service attack or other degradation of the network through overt hostile acts, natural disaster, or any of a number of other events that could affect public Internet bandwidth, could disconnect organizations from the public cloud without warning, if there aren’t proper provisions made for alternate connections.